The morning had already been quite busy. Trevor and Randal had made use of the earlier part of the dawn by trecking out into Syka's thick jungle maw and hauling a hefty number of trees out from the rainforest with the aid of a set of ropes and a goodly -- and draining -- amount of old-fashioned manpower.

Meanwhile, Syna was well on her way towards reaching the pinnacle of the glorious blue and wispy white sky. The sun goddess' radiance sparkled and spun off of her dazzling form as she danced across the morning horizon that her own presence had breathed light and heat into -- just as she had done an immeasurable number of times throughout the millennia, ever since first being appointed by the trio of Time, Death, and Life themselves to always faithfully bring the morn's much-needed and nurturing light.

Underneath the warming light of Syna -- which was somewhat oppressively hot on Falyndar's harsh coast -- Trevor worked to draw a small but sturdy tree from atop a pile of similar wooden poles. The man hefted and dragged the lumber off to the left side of the pile of felled wood that he and Randal had hauled through Syka's brush. He lifted and carried the log a good ways away from the rest of the trees and over to where a thin, but quite long, measuring cloth and a handsaw lay -- carpenters' tools that Randal had allowed Trevor to borrow and which had been sourced from a unfurled, leather tool roll that sat open on the baking sand not too far from both men.

Across From Trevor, on the opposite side of the lumber pile, Randal worked with his own tree, measuring cloth, and saw. The carpenter was well into his work and doing his best to use the strength of his muscled and well-developed forearm to drive his saw blade through the wood before him. Earlier on, the man had shown Trevor just how one went about prepping a tree to be cut and sawed through.

Trevor released the tree he'd taken off of the pile of trees onto the toasty sand. The man then retrieved his borrowed measuring cloth and began to unwind and draw it out along the length of the log before him.

Trevor rolled out the measuring cloth that he'd borrowed from Randal, just as he had previously seen the carpenter do. Randal was already well into his own work, but the man that the carpenter had spent the better part of the morning teaching had yet to even measure the length of the tree that he was now himself working on.

The measuring roll was lightweight and intuitively easy to work with, so simple was its design -- a mere strip of thin, but sturdy, and brownish tinted cloth that bore a linear progression of accurately increasing numbers penned down its length. Trevor stretched the cloth out, doing his very best to lay it flat and neatly against the sand closest to the felled tree that he was attempting to get the height measurements of.

Trevor found that it did not take long at all to stretch the length of the measuring roll out along the side of the tree. He did devote a few more moments past the time that took to straighten and make sure that the measuring tape was properly aligned, however. After that, Trevor turned his attention to the end of the tape.

When Randal had first demonstrated to Trevor how to read and use a measuring roll, the tree that the carpenter had measured had been shorter than the strip of cloth that the man was using. Trevor, however, found that the tree he was now measuring was more or less exactly the same length as the cloth that he'd stretched out alongside it.

Trevor traced the measuring roll to its end with his eyes, noting the one-five that was marked on the part of the cloth that sat beside the very tip of the tree that he was attempting to measure.

"We'll need at least eight, seven-foot poles to frame out the sides of your house," Randal's instructions from before echoed in Trevor's mind as he read the measuring cloth.

Remembering the expert carpenter's directions, Trevor retrieved the small handsaw that he had left lying nearby into his grasp. Carefully, he braced his left hand against the tree and marked the six-foot point on its shaft with the blade of the tool that he'd picked up, driving the saw into the wood for a single pass or two.

After marking the half-way mark of where he'd need to cut, Trevor drew his hands and body back for a moment and glanced towards the end of the tree he'd measured out. According to Randal, he only needed fourteen feet of wood from this tree; however, if he merely cut a six-foot section away from the fifteen-foot timber then one-half of the two cut pieces would have an undesired extra inch tacked onto it.

Trevor walked along the length of the measuring tape, being careful not to disturb it and stopped towards the end of it. Carefully, he leaned down, and -- taking care to fit his saw between the branches that stuck out at the top of the tree -- marked the fourteen-foot mark on the tree with three passes of his saw; the young man figured that the best way to remove undesirable wood was surely to cut it off.

Trevor glanced up and over the nearby stack of trees to where Randal was working on processing and cutting through a tree of his own. The young man observed that, despite the man having already marked out where he intended to cut the timber later on, Randal had not yet actually begun sawing the tree in half in earnest. Rather, the carpenter seemed to have decided to tackle the job of removing his tree's limbs and branches before he deigned to move onto cutting it completely in two.

Having taken note of Randal's more experienced actions, Trevor rose up to his feet and moved over to the top-heavy end of his own tree. The man took in the scope of the timber's branches and twigs; as he gazed on with his pale blue eyes, he was trying to decide where the best place to start at removing the tree's woody protrusions might be.

"Towards the top of the trees you'll have to remove the branches with your saw; cut flush to the tree's length and just keep the branches in a pile -- we'll need them later on," Randal's words echoed in Trevor's mind, as the young man thought on what the best starting point would be for the late morning's portion of the long day's work.

It didn't take Trevor but a breath or two to decide on starting his sawing at the limb that was the furthest down the plant's trunk and also closest to his own person. It only seemed logical -- and most clean and efficient -- to start at the base of tree's branches and to climb upwards across them as he worked; this way, he'd avoid having to move back between branches and also just having to think too terribly hard about which branch to progress to after clearing one or another of them off.

With his mind made up as to his plan and desired course of action, Trevor lined his saw up against the flesh of his chosen tree limb's flesh and began to move the tool back and forth.

"Cut flush to the tree's length," Randal's advice echoed once more into Trevor's ears, the sound of the older carpenter's voice transcending time through the young man's short term memory.

After a moment or two of sawing, to give himself a little more control over his saw and to take a bit of his body weight off of the tool, Trevor found himself grabbing further up the trunk of the tree with his free hand. Stabilized by his left hand's grip on the tree's trunk, the young man was able to slide his saw back and forth a bit better and with a bit more finesse than before.

The deeper Trevor's saw knicked into the flesh of the tree limb, the harder and harder it seemed for the man to make progress in cutting said section of lumber. It was not an insurmountable challenge to continue cutting the limb by any means, but as his saw bit down harder and harder there was a little less give in the wood the further Trevor sliced into the hardy flora's skin and inner flesh.

Trevor's own skin itched, as he watched piece after piece of small, tiny, wood flakes crack off from the branch that he was splitting. By the time that Trevor had finished cutting through one branch and discarded it to the side, his whole forearm was covered in itch-inducing wood ships. He did his best to shake off the wood flecks, but -- of course -- within moments of starting to saw into the next branch the chips that he had managed to shake off had been replaced by newer and fresher pulpy flakes of their kin.

As his own forearm began to burn internally, his untrained muscles fatiguing under the physical demands of the handsaw, and his skin began to sizzle -- with the wood chips irritating his flesh -- Trevor began to sink into a focused state. It was as if the man's active mind and thoughts, able to focus on a repetitive task, began to slink back into the background and allow his body and muscles to take dominion over the task at hand.

With his mind floating in a work-induced stasis and his body going through the routine that he'd worked to establish while cutting the first branch that he'd sawed through, as he reached the halfway mark through the tree's second branch, his eyes began to notice a few small things that they just hadn't seemed to catch before.

Trevor almost absently-mindedly noticed that the wood chips of the tree's internal structure were of a color that was not too far, although certainly much more yellow toned, than his own flesh. This discovery did very little to rouse Trevor's somewhat relaxed mind at first until a stray thought caught the man's attention -- or rather until a stray quote from earlier in the season floated across his mind's ear.

"I'm speaking of amputation, which should always be a last resort, but it is a last resort that should be done the moment that it is needed, nonetheless," the voice of Jansen, Syka's doctor and Trevor's teacher, echoed through Trevor's mind as his eyes focused in on the wood flakes.

Trevor slowly stopped sawing away at the branch that he was working on making progress through, even despite almost having cut entirely through it. His subconscious mind had produced the inkling of an interesting thought, one that had been curious enough to cause the man's conscious will to take over and to follow and entertain the musing of his unfocused mind further.

Trevor's saw remained unmoving for another moment, as he contemplated just as to why his mind had seemingly randomly drawn a correlation between the color of wood chips and the concept of amputation -- two, at least on the surface, totally unrelated things.

After all, wood chips were a physical thing and amputation was a medical procedure -- one that was no more than a concept to Trevor, no less, as he had not the skill to perform an amputation himself nor had he ever yet seen one performed on, or by, another. And yet, there was a strong enough feeling of an idea brewing on the metaphorical tip of his tongue regarding a connection between the two things that urged Trevor to think further on what such a connection might just be.

Trevor's blue eyes squinted in a gaze filled with curiosity at his wood-chip covered forearm. He noticed that the wood chips were almost the color of his flesh once more -- again, they were just more yellow in color tone.

Trying to keep his train of thought consistent, he shifted his focus back to thinking on how amputation might be correlated to the sight of the woods chips on his arm; and yet all that he could come up with was that amputations were carried out on flesh that was very much like that of his own skin that the wood chips sat upon.

As he shifted his train of thought between the two observations, however, his mind did finally make the connection that he'd felt was brimming just under the surface of his consciousness -- like a fire that had been deprived of life by merely the absence of a single spark but that had then been granted said spark, Trevor's mind came ablaze with the realization that he had ceased his sawing of the tree before him in an attempt to come to.

With the curiosity in his eyes intensifying, but his squint lessening somewhat, Trevor began to saw into the flesh of the tree limb once more. As he sawed, he observed for the first time that he was not actually sawing straight into something, but rather that he was actually finely pulverising the flesh of the tree into tiny pieces and then removing said pieces with the movement of his saw -- just as, he realized, one would tear away pieces of flesh during an amputation or when one's tissue was otherwise cut.

Trevor, of course, had realized for most of his life that trees were alive, but his mind relating the wood chips so closely in nature to skin so suddenly really intensified his understanding and drove a number of ideas and questions into his mind.

The young man glanced over to Randal. Upon seeing that the carpenter was paying him no mind, Trevor ceased sawing the limb that he'd been working on and focused his attentions down to his own forearm. The young man breathed into his nose very deeply. Just as food was incorporated into one's own being, so too in a way was air -- and as the oxygen of his breath entered and refreshed his body, Trevor directed his consciousness to the djed inherent in the body parts that the wave of fresh relief, brought on by his deep inhalation, touched and spread to.

Even after the sensation of having his breath flow through his lungs and limbs had passed, Trevor held onto the feeling of his djed. He held on to the almost etheral feeling, the pulsating and lightweight touch that was so easy to miss, of his astral body and djed pathways. All across his nervous system he attempted to feel the djed that attached to, flowed within, was, and manipulated every nerve and tendon as if it was an ethereal skeleton -- for truly one's astral body was the skeleton behind even the physical skeleton, as it was the former that allowed the latter to move at all, for the astral body was a soul's will translated into a force that could manipulate the physical body that it was tied to.

The feeling and awareness of his astral body and djed pathways was not so much science to Trevor as it was art, nor were the things that he felt really something that he understood in the context of words or theory, but rather it was something that he felt. Perhaps he would one day learn that what he felt was, in reality, his nervous system's djed pathways and his astral body's touch on his flesh, but as for now he merely felt these things as something inherent within his physical form -- something that he could feel but not name or truly articulate.

The more and more he practiced his magic, the more that he could feel the connection between his astral body, or at least what he could perceive of it, and his physical shell -- and the more that he could instinctively understand that it was the djed that the latter manipulated within his physical body that truly decided what he was and not the default nature of the flesh and bones that his soul had dwelt within since his birth.

When Trevor's mind had touched all the energy that it could within his body, the man directed his attention more closely to the djed that flowed through, and was, his forearm. What he did next was neither the reshaping of his astral form -- for he had no awareness that such things could actually be done -- nor the redistributing of the flow of djed within his physical body, but rather it was something different. The man felt deeply what he was, what the djed of the physical flesh that his astral body controlled declared him to be, and then he let it all go. He did not simply cease focusing on his djed and he did not just forget what his flesh did on an intellectual level, but rather he allowed himself on a deeper and more primordial level to forget what he was -- for a split second in time he willed the djed of his forearm to forget its own shape and he allowed himself to forget his own forearm's shape.

In the next second, he was instructing his djed as to what it should instead become by his will. Focusing on the texture and feeling of the wood chips that lay atop his arm, Trevor funneled this information of the wood's feeling and consistency into the djed that was intertwined with his own flesh and that declared what said flesh's inherent nature was. Slowly but surely, the skin of his forearm -- not his hand and not his triceps or above -- began to change color; his forearm's skin grew at first yellow and then all together gnarled, thicker, and ruggedly rough.

The burning and irritated sensation that the wood chips on Trevor's forearms had caused dissipated and disappeared entirely from his flesh, as his flesh became like the very wood that had irritated it in the first place. Trevor couldn't help but smile -- he had never even considered turning his flesh to bark, before now.